Design Concepts
Carriers like working with Convoy because it takes out the middle man, the broker. While Convoy is a digital brokerage, the automated process makes carriers feel like they donât have to hassle with a broker to find loads. The irony of this is that carriers also like the ability to speak with someone and they want to negotiate like they would with a broker. As a designer, it was my job to simulate a broker interaction but without the negative experience.
What We Did
Topic #1: Should we do more than one round of counter offers?
We did not allow the carrier to counter our counteroffer but instead encouraged them to come back and bid again if they didnât want to accept the counteroffer. This was one of the critical decisions we had to make. Carriers wanted a back and forth negotiation, but from a science perspective, this wasnât feasible. Science believed we should do a single counter offer because repeated counter offers with the same $ value would do more harm than good.
Design - Counteroffer
Topic #2: Should we allow carrierâs to think through and respond to our counteroffer after some time v/s immediately?
One of the big questions was if we should we allow carrierâs the ability to think through the counteroffer before immediately accepting and if so, what does that look like.
The pros:
- Allows them to âwork out logisticsâ before they can commit
- Allows other parallel tasks on the app
- Creates urgency and gives them a feeling of full control
The cons:
- Should we display a timer and if we do does that make the carrier think that we are locking the bid for them
- If we give a window and donât display a timer, how do we communicate that?
- A small chance to price compare
We allowed a 15 minute acceptance window for logistics. We did not provide a timer but instead adjusted the booked now rate to the counteroffer price and showed expired under counteroffer info item.
Design - Window
Topic #3: Should we âsoftenâ our rejection?
Pros of not âSofteningâ:
- Encourages to bid closer to true cost by creating urgency
- Quicker resolution, encouraging participation in other loads
- Eliminates the risk of double âacceptanceâ and hence difficult decisions for the future
Cons of not âSofteningâ:
- Final rejection can imply a failed negotiation and wasted time
- Perception that they can never win this load (while they can bid and they can win it)
- Trust buster if we indeed reach out at a later point in time
We chose to not soften our rejection.
Proposed Flow
Broker Board Updates
Now that we had the proposed concepts, it was time to bring parity to the broker board. The broker board is an internal tool that our brokers use to match carriers with loads. In other auction types, brokers manually go in and match loads with carriers based on a variety of factors: carrier performance, rate, time to pickup. With our instant auction, the goal was to automate the process. However, if a load was not matched through IA, brokers could go in and manually accept loads. To begin, I needed to understand the internal tool a little bit better.
First off, there were no resources dedicated to this tool. That meant no designer, no dedicated engineer, no figma files, docs, etc. To make the changes, I had to create a file from scratch.
The second part of this was learning about the Convoy brokerage operation. First, I met with some of the brokers and learned about their day to day operation and their frustrations with the tool. I also completed the brokerboard training that they use to onboard brokers.
My goal on the broker board was to show the following:
- Indicate which loads were IA
- Display bid history
- Carrier bid (true price bid)
- Last event
- Timestamp of the last carrier interaction
- Number of bids the carrier has placed on the load
- Last, identify some small UI changes that I felt were necessary ( broker board was a visual mess)
Broker Board Concepts